Sorry if I'm missing something obvious, but I'd find it much more useful if the word count functioned for the whole document. It seems that it tracks to the paragraph, and I can't find a way to set it differently.

@bobcoulter you can show a section's word count by clicking on a section (or indeed the whole manuscript) in the outline. It's a good point though that you may want to stick to a mode where you present the containing section's word count even if an individual paragraph is selected.

Yes, I found that as a manual option, but it seems kludgy to have to check rather than just glance at the bottom of the screen. The use case where a document has a word count limit seems common in academic writing, at least in education and social sciences. I've never seen a case where the word count per paragraph was relevant.

A really useful feature would be the ability to do word counts for "collections" of sections. Many academic publications have separate word count limits for the abstract and body text, which might or might not include figure and table legends and the acknowledgements/disclosures section, but probably won't include the bibliography.

A possible workaround for this would be to put all of the sections for the main body of the manuscript under one heading, but that has the disadvantage of messing up the heading structure (everything drops down the subheading hierarchy by one level).

What I suggest is this: allow the user to group sections for the purposes of word count (for example I might have one "group" for the abstract, one for introduction/methods/results/discussion, and one for acknowledgements and bibliography (which doesn't get counted)). The user could then set individual word count limits for each group (e.g. 300 for abstract, 4000 for body, etc.). Each group could have a tickbox to include/exclude any legends within that section in the count. From the way that Manuscripts structures its documents, I would imagine that this would be fairly straightforward - and this could also potentially make templates that much more useful.